Not quite... we have 1,000 ideas for every coder, but a 1,000 coders for every good idea (and probably about 1:1 good ideas and good coders :-D )

Wait, where's your level 1 helpdesk!?

Seriously though, it depends on what you're doing with your IT infrastructure. If you're doing nice simple predictable things, yes you're going to be happy with a small team. On the other hand I work in CS research and with 4 sysadmins the infrastructure is still the wobbliest thing going because there's so much damn weird/esoteric stuff going on.

You've just dodged half the questions, though. Failure of user's own equipment will be a nightmare, doubly so as it's virtually impossible to tell the difference between a genuine problem and someone who is just claiming the PC ate the file. Working at a university, we can manage a lot of this because we provide 24 hour access to tightly locked down systems that we know will work (or, if they don't, we'll know because we get a hundred support queries instead of just one).

I'll accept, we've never had a serious problem with staff-provided PDFs. For coursework submission though:

1. During first rollout, we had a significant number of students who saved their file to the desktop, opened the web application and clicked the "Upload" button. Apparently the step where they needed to tell the system what file to upload was a surprise. We now have to e-mail out cryptographically signed receipts when a file is uploaded, to confirm the system has the file.

2. Students rapidly figured out however that they could upload work, get a receipt, then delete it (as if to replace it with a new file) and claim the system had eaten it. So now we're also tracking all work submitted over time. Marks and feedback are also attached to the file uploaded (not the assignment due), so that if a student is allowed to re-submit after the due date, any marks entered are correctly preserved.

3. Students submit work to the wrong places, so now we have time locks (maximum number of weeks before work is due, that they can submit), and the ability to readily move work between assignments.

4. Students submit the wrong format, either because it's what they have, or because they haven't the faintest clue what they're doing. You would not believe how many people think they can convert .doc to .docx or .pdf by renaming the file.

5. Students submit files with distinct oddities. PDFs with security turned on and printing disabled for example. Word documents that open in some versions of Office and not others. Are these okay? Can they be filtered out?

6. Viruses; both Word and PDF documents can carry viruses, so now you have to virus scan incoming work. Can you reject work if it matches a virus signature, or do you have to keep a copy of it quarantined until a techy can examine it? If you reject work but the student's done it, is it late?

Also, are you suggesting that coursework doesn't need printing, or that the school prints it themselves? The former doesn't match the feedback we've received from academics (or; you try marking 30 essays on computer and tell me how you feel about the experience), the latter is an extra cost to the school.

Long story short, electronic coursework submission is a lot harder than it looks. Support is getting there, but this is really waiting on there being proper generic frameworks for supporting it.

What's the advantage to the school? You're talking about introducing highly complex IT systems that will require development and support, both of which are expensive. What's the school going to get out of this?

I work on (development, training, support, strategy, the whole lot) these sort of systems for a university, and even for us the list of "nice to have" features that aren't going to be implemented is huge (100+ items last time I looked). A lot of schools are adopting open source solutions such as Moodle ( http://moodle.org/ ), but we're still at the point that for many smaller institutions it just doesn't make sense on cost vs benefit.

Got myself a copy (my employer appears to have a subscription), The really critical bit here is:

"Performing a fast scan on one of the drives resulted in a possible credit card hit as demonstrated in Image 10."

While they conclude that it's likely this is a credit card, based on the card identifier (first four numbers) and that it matches the Luhn algorithm (mis-spelt as "Luhr" in the article - that took a while to figure out!), however the Luhn algorithm isn't designed for this sort of use, it's primarily there to catch data entry mistakes. I'm fairly happy that the chances of a match like this on a multi-GB hard drive are fairly good, just through random chance. A good follow-up experiment here would be to buy new XBox 360s, buy points and then scan the hard drive for the card used.

IMHO their points raised about finding gamer tags, friend lists, etc. are probably far more relevant, especially in relation to this data not being destroyed when a factory reset is done.

There's some really odd bits, though... "In this particular instance, we can see NAT (Network Address Translation) rules for a site called Bungle.net[sic], where Halo players can have their stats tracked or purchase games and merchandise [36]." - which as far as I can tell is actually a list of errors you can get if your NAT setup is causing problems.

I'd also be more confident if the work had less odd errors; "Book and Nuke, by DBAN is", presumably refers to "Darik's Boot and Nuke", frequently abbreviated to "DBAN".

Gyah; apologies, correct spec was edited the 12th ( http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/editing/raw-file/tip/editing.html ).

The relevant spec ( http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#refsEDITING ) was last edited yesterday (28th March 2012). Damn hard to hit a moving target and all that.

> The fact that you are "concerned" at ANY level about the possibility of not being able to play a game for a little while is difficult to understand, especially when you have the free choice of not purchasing said game.

You clearly speak as someone who has never tried to connect Steam over wifi to an Android phone, so they can get it into offline mode, to give them something to do while while the Internet is down...

Seriously though; when the Internet is down is more or less exactly when I want to have computer games readily available to play. It's almost like it's fine tuned to be as annoying as possible.

I've had over a week's Internet downtime in the last year, and absolutely no power outage. You can understand if perhaps I'm more concerned about one than the other, then?

I'm not buying it. I'll probably buy something from GOG instead.

Still disappointed though.

I work on a research campus, that helps...

Seriously though; it would be nice to believe that a miracle-cure for massive brain injuries is just around the corner (or in fact, a miracle cure for pretty much anything serious), but realistically you have to weigh your odds, and I don't like them. If I'm that much of a vegetable, I wouldn't want to hang around hoping..

> I have to say that I think civil disobedience against copyright law is justified

Really? You think helping yourself to as much copyright material as you would like sends any message except "I don't like paying for stuff"?

If you really want to make a stand, don't buy OR pirate content. Watch more Youtube, play more free games, download music that's been genuinely released for free.

A "protest" that makes things easier for you isn't going to sway anyone.

Global warming will take a long time to make winters consistently mild. Keep in mind, for example, that the west coast just got snowed senseless.

> Being part of the generation Z, sometimes I still wonder how people survived with less than one megabyte of memory, no tabs (no Internet!)... Depressing!

I still have flashbacks sometimes, but I'm slowly recovering....

Any of those companies could have taken the concept of Facebook and implemented their own, but they would have remained playing catch-up with features in Facebook (as it moved from a college-centric system to a more generalised social media platform, as the API was released, etc.)

I would also point out that Facebook patent filings appear to have first been done in 2006 ( http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/01/facebook-patent-filings/ ), two years later.

As it stands, it took Google 7 years to get its own Facebook-clone out, and that's doing decidedly mixedly so far. I don't recall patents being amongst G+'s issues, though...